Author: Tif Chaney

The graveyard swallows me whole. No roads, only footpaths meander around 300-year-old gravestones with blurred names and dates and solitary brick markers. Just inside the gates is a small mailbox empty of guide pamphlets—there’s an app for that now.

Defiant weeds and summer flowers poke their way out between twig and stone on the footpath as I wander. Some graves are completely covered in concrete, as if the dead would arise according to old superstitions—or to protect the peaceful dead from vandals.

My fingers gently touch the headstone of a small child only a few months old, her mother lain nearby. There are other young children. A nearby wooden grave is draped with colorful Mardi Gras beads. British and American flags stick in the dirt. I can only make out “Little Girl Buried” on her dark and smoldered marker…

Endia Beal is a Winston-Salem artist who gives voice to those who are marginalized or unseen, creating universal dialogue about issues of race and gender, or what Beal says it is like to be the “other.”

Some compare the onset of the Primitivism movement with the same zeal that the Pastoral movement overtook artists and authors before Impressionism, when the idealism of a Golden Age ruled. The common thread that runs through both movements is the idea of untouched nature, of untouched innocence, and of a place unsullied by civilization. So many describe Primitvism as less of an art movement and more of a found sensibility or “cultural attitude.”

“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose, by any other name would smell as sweet,” quotes Juliet to Romeo in Shakespeare’s classic. Yet, in art, sometimes the name is the only indicator to the art enthusiast about the painter’s intention…

Daily experience is subject to five sensory filters–smell, sound, touch, taste, and feeling, a delirium of interpretation. Dali turns that on the head. The rose defies gravity, fully bloomed over the desert landscape…